1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data management system which performs editing operations including retrieving, adding, deleting, modifying and registering operations of data in a data base.
2. Description of the Related Art
When it is desired to create a personal data base with use of a data base program comprising records each having a plurality of fields, conventionally, a user defines attributes corresponding to such fields as name, postal number, address, and telephone number and then enters them on a case basis. This method has such a merit that, since each case is divided into such attributes, even when the user wishes such a complicated request that it is desired to create, e.g., a list of only names and telephone numbers, the data base can easily cope with it.
However, when it is desired to add items of birthday and occupation as an additional data to the list in the course of creating the list, it becomes necessary to re-create the data base from the beginning, which imposes a great deal of burden on the user. In other words, with respect to such data that attribute items per se are modified, the flexibility of the data base itself becomes vital.
Meanwhile, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2-93742 discloses a technique in which a plurality of data base definers are provided in a data base. However, in this technique, a user must re-define each definer independently and no consideration is paid to modification of the definer itself.
Recently, in addition to data such as an address book, a stock list and an achievement table usually managed in offices or companies, various sorts of data such as literature data, dictionaries and newspaper articles have been increasingly handled. The prior art data base, however, has not have a framing function of integrally managing such various sorts of data.
For this reason, the user must re-define the management framing every time and the data base can merely have an ability of defining the framing.
In this way, the once defined framing imposes restrictions on data to be handled, thus making it difficult to absorb the data diversification. In other words, if such data to be frequently modified as mentioned earlier is to be dealt with time, then the problem talking here is that various sorts of data cannot be handled by single framing when time is fixed.
For example, in a programming language known as `Smalltalk-80`, it is necessary to define a class of a new object each time by setting its instance variable or the like, which results in that it is difficult to generate all necessary objects in one class definition (refer to a reference book entitled "SMALLTALK-80: The Language And its Implementation" by Adele Goldberg, David Robson, Addison Wesley).
Meanwhile, when a data base has a very high function, the possibility of being able to cope with diversified applications becomes high; whereas, the data base becomes complicated in handling, thus resulting in that ordinary users cannot use it easily. The aforementioned re-definition problem also leads to the fact that the user interface becomes complex. Thus, in the case of such a data base, it is difficult for ordinary users who are not experts to readily have a good command of the data base.
There has been proposed a personal easy data base in which, as disclosed in a paper entitled "A Tool for Construction of Personal Database: TRIAS" (Journal of Information Processing Society of Japan, Jun. 6, 1989, Vol. 30, No. 6), one unit of data is managed in the form of a set of 3 of entity, attribute and value for easy human understanding, but no reference is made to user interface itself.
Further, in a paper entitled "KIDS: A User Interface System for the Electronic Dictionary" (Journal of Human Interface Research Group in Information Processing Society of Japan, 32-1, Sep. 12, 1990) regarding research of electronic dictionary user interface, there is stated that though flexibility is emphasized too much but a problem of user's understandability and convenience of the user interface still remain not solved. In a paper entitled "User Interface for CD-ROM Retriever" reported in Proceedings of the 42th General Meeting of the Information Processing Society of Japan, 1L-5, an input window, a control panel, a candidate window and a data body window are provided as basic windows for retrieval for the purpose of obtaining a higher convenience, but this is generalized for retrieval of the Kojien CD-ROM and no special consideration is paid to a relationship between its configuration and actual data unit structure. In particular, when such a function as addition, deletion, modification or registration is applied, the user interface becomes further complicated, which is still a problem to users who wants to perform editing operation.
In this way, there have been proposed various sorts of data bases including a personal card type data base and data bases which can be used on personal computers. However, no considerations have been given to such data of which attributes are frequently modified or to the variety of data. Further, in order to fully utilize these systems, it is required to study for their operations, and previous classification and re-arrangement of data to be stored are required.
These years, there has been developed a data retriever which converts language data into electronic data, stores the electronic data and retrieves data through various sorts of interfaces, a typical example of which is known as such an electronic dictionary capable of electronically retrieving desired data as an English-Japanese dictionary, a Japanese-English dictionary or an encyclopedia.
An electronic dictionary disclosed in the Japanese Patent Publication No. 52-4749, for example, fundamentally comprises data sets each having an index and a translation so that when inputting an index, its translation can be obtained which is easy to read by intuition. Further, ordinary electronic dictionaries are often used only for its retrieval, whereas such electronic dictionaries that a keyword is applied to data to be edited and retrieving operation is carried out on the basis of keywords, are suitable for easy handling of personal data. These are Generally called "personal data base" and have been put to practical use and spread as so-called card type data bases as shown in, e.g., the Japanese Patent Publication No. 59-870. In this case, it is common that a plurality of retrieval keys can be applied to one data, for which reason the number of correlations between the key and data become plural-to-plural and thus its data structure becomes more complicated than that of electronic dictionaries.
In electronic dictionaries, its user interface itself is also easy to understand because of its simple data structure. In so-called personal data bases, on the other hand, such basic operation that a key is applied for retrieving operation is the same as in the electronic dictionaries. However, increase in number of functions and complicated data structure make difficult for the user to operate such systems. In particular, designation of the retrieval key, which is a very important work which determines retrieval efficiency, is troublesome. As explained earlier, in an electronic dictionary, a basic data unit is made up of a pair of an index and a translation, the index itself becomes a retrieval key.
In a data base wherein a plurality of keywords can be set for one general record, on the other hand, it is necessary to designate the keywords by some means or other. In a card type personal data base, for example, it is common that when character strings are written as a keyword at a specified location, these become retrieval keys. Further, in text information, it is common to attach a certain name to each data and the name is held generally as a field. Since the data name can imply the data itself in a short word, it is often used as a retrieval key.
Meanwhile, in the prior art keyword retrieval system, it has been necessary for a user to change the data name as necessary and designate it as a retrieval key. When such keywords as mentioned above are written and arranged, in particular, this often doubly troublesomely requires addition and arrangement of the name.
In the conventional retrieving operation of an electronic dictionary, a title, an index or a character string corresponding thereto (which will be referred to merely as `title`, hereinafter) is basically entered to read out and display the contents of the corresponding data. Considering an English-Japanese dictionary, for example, the electronic dictionary has a comprehensive survey function of listing up all words starting with `ab`. This function provides, when there are a plurality of corresponding candidates, display of the candidates on each candidate basis or on a plural-candidate basis so that the user can proceed a next step such as output/display of the data which the user designated. The retrieving procedure holds true even for ordinary data bases. For the sake of retrieval convenience, such `classification indexes` as in a thesaurus are previously provided or classification data are held to easy creation of the classification indexes. In this case, for convenience of retrieval, the whole data of the electronic dictionary or data base are previously sorted in an alphabetic order with respect to, e.g., index character strings or divided or classified into areas to allow easy retrieval based on the classification. Further, there are some Kana-Kanji conversion dictionaries for word processors, which the users can add data therein.
However, in the case of a general data base having an editing function, there has been deviced to temporarily hold a retrieved result but the retrieved result itself never become new data or another independently accessible data. In a system using the aforementioned classification indexes, even if a retrieved result can be held in some form, because a user interface for reading out the held data must be provided separately from an original editing interface, the operability has been remarkably deteriorated. In other words, it has been impossible to hold the retrieved result itself as new data having exactly the same form as other data nor to handle the retrieved result independently in applications other than the data base. Furthermore, in word processors, restrictions are imposed on the format and content of registerable data and it is also impossible to extract a plurality of words from the dictionary and hold them in a list form. This generally holds true for so-called `user's dictionaries`.
In these electronic dictionaries, desired data can be retrieved in various ways including word retrieval or complex retrieval and a retrieved result can be displayed in a predetermined area of the display screen.
However, in these electronic dictionaries, desired data can be retrieved but a display area for display of the retrieved data is fixed. For this reason, there has been such a defect that, when retrieval of one data is carried out after retrieval of another data, the first retrieved data being displayed disappears and it is impossible to look at a plurality of data at the same time or to compare these data. Further, even when a partial character string in the previously-retrieved data is used as a new retrieval key, the user must enter the character string newly with troublesome operation.
Since the prior art electronic dictionaries can have a function of merely presenting the retrieved data, it is difficult to create a new data source on the basis of a plurality of retrieved data.